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Hollandaise Sauce
Take the yolks of six eggs and beat them up with a very little flour and a bit of butter about the size of a hazel-nut. Add a little pepper and salt, a blade of mace, two table-spoonfuls of vinegar and four of water. Put the mixture in a saucepan on the fire, and stir until it just begins to boil; then take it off, and put in a good lump of butter; stir it well together, always going round the same way, until the butter is thoroughly incorporated. The sauce is then ready to serve. Do not return it to the fire after putting in the final piece of butter.
A late-Victorian hollandaise built as a thickened custard rather than the modern butter emulsion — the flour is doing insurance work. It behaves well if you respect the one rule the recipe itself flags.
- The hinge: no heat after the final butterOnce the last lump of butter goes in, the sauce is held together by emulsion alone and will split if it goes back on the burner. Take the pan off, and if it needs holding, sit it in a bowl of warm (not hot) water.
- "Just begins to boil"Read this as the moment the surface trembles and the mixture visibly thickens; no temperature is given in the recipe. Yolks set from about 150F upward, and an actual rolling boil will scramble them into grains no amount of stirring will smooth.
- QuantitiesSix yolks, two tablespoons vinegar and four of water come to roughly three-quarters of a cup before the butter, and something over a cup once the butter is in -- enough for six or so servings with fish, asparagus or boiled poultry. Halve it for a small household.
- "A good lump of butter"Unhelpfully vague. For six yolks, 4 to 6 oz (1 to 1 1/2 sticks) is the sensible range; more butter means a richer, looser sauce. Add it in pieces, not all at once, and cold butter incorporates more forgivingly than melted.
- The flour"A very little" means about a teaspoon, worked smooth into the yolks with the hazelnut of butter before any liquid goes near it. It is a stabiliser against curdling, not a thickener; more than a teaspoon or two and the sauce tastes pasty.
- A blade of maceOne piece of the dried outer covering of nutmeg, still sold whole in good spice shops. Fish it out before serving. A pinch of ground mace, well under 1/8 teaspoon, substitutes; go light.
- The vinegarA plain white wine vinegar suits best; cider or malt vinegar will read as harsh here. Modern hollandaise often starts from a reduced vinegar, which this version does not, so the finished sauce is likely to taste sharper.
- "Always going round the same way"Kitchen lore rather than physics, but the underlying instruction is sound: stir steadily and constantly with a wooden spoon or small whisk, keeping the sauce moving over the whole base of the pan so no part of it overheats.
Hollandaise means simply "Dutch sauce," and English cookery books of the nineteenth century printed it under that plain name; the association with the Netherlands is generally traced to butter and eggs being the notable produce of Dutch dairy farming, though the link has never been documented with any precision. What is striking about this version is how far it sits from the modern French emulsion of yolks, clarified butter and reduction: Cassell's builds a small flour-bound egg sauce first, then enriches it, which is essentially a safety-first method for a kitchen where a split sauce meant wasted butter. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, an enormous alphabetical compendium of the 1870s onward aimed at middle-class households with a cook rather than a chef, tends to favour exactly this kind of reliable compromise.